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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

From Michigan to Korea, Robots Keep Food Rolling When People Can’t

Prior to this pandemic, the big ethical questions surrounding food robotics and automation was their impact on loss of human jobs. But as COVID-19 has forced us to social distance and rethink our regular activities, replacing humans with robots for food delivery seems like a more ethical choice. Robots, after all, don’t need face masks, can be placed in frontline situations and won’t accidentally cough on your groceries.

As it’s done with many other aspects of the meal journey, the coronavirus is accelerating the adoption of certain types of food tech — like robots — that otherwise would have come to market on a much longer timeline.

The Detroit News posted a story yesterday about the increased demand for Refraction’s delivery robots in Michigan. Refraction makes the rugged, three-wheeled, self-driving REV-1 delivery bot. It’s bigger than Starship’s cooler-sized robots, yet not as big as Nuro’s self-driving pod vehicles.

At the end of last year, Refraction kicked off a beta program to deliver takeout meals from four different Ann Arbor restaurants. The Detroit News reports that Refraction now has more than 400 restaurant partners and the company’s fleet of five robots is running at capacity. Refraction is also working to get into grocery delivery.

The robots are cleaned between deliveries, and Refraction has added UV lights to the interior of the robot to further sanitize the cargo compartment. The robot is also contactless as consumers use their phone to unlock and open the robot to retrieve their food.

Refraction’s robots also, obviously, reduce human-to-human contact for people receiving food while sheltering in place. Our country may regain a certain amount of freedom to move in the coming months, but we’ve had a pretty healthy fear of other people pumped into us for the past couple of months. Robots may be more welcome once we’re past this.

These robotic advantages could also be applied beyond restaurant delivery and into restaurants themselves. The Korea Times reports that this week Woowa Bros. announced it would offer free rentals of its “Dilly” server robot to 50 restaurants in Korea for two months starting in mid-April.

The Dilly is an autonomous robot with a series of racks meant to work the front of house, delivering food from the kitchen to tables and bringing empty plates back.

Woowa Bros. launched the Dilly server program back in November and charged roughly $773 a month (with a two-year contract) for the robot. The Korea Times writes that 164 restaurants applied for the program, and currently Woowa has 23 robots operating in 16 restaurants across Korea.

It’s entirely likely that we’ll see more server robots in restaurants here in the U.S. as well. Though coronavirus has permanently shuttered at least 3 percent of restaurants across the nation, there’s already talk of what restaurants will look like when dine-in rooms re-open. Expect fewer people, disposable menus, and possibly servers wearing masks.

One has to wonder what people will prefer interacting with: a server wearing a mask or a robot? To be fair, a lot more of us will probably be wearing masks in public in the near future, but the cold, sterility of a robot may be more appealing to nervous people just starting to come out from sheltering in place.

Refraction and Woowa aren’t the only examples of robots gaining more popularity. Starship recently expanded the use of its food delivery robots beyond college campuses and onto city streets in Arizona and around Washington DC. And Nuro just got the greenlight to test its autonomous delivery vehicles on public streets in California.

But it’s not just the consumer end of the robotic equation that we should be thinking about. While robots may help reduce human-to-human contact when accepting your food, they also relieve some of the new dangers of being a delivery person. Let’s face it, delivery people have worked hard during this outbreak and have often gotten the short end of the gig economy stick. Ideally the food industry can use any savings from automation to help fund new job opportunities for humans.

The ethical questions surrounding the availability of human jobs in an increasingly automated world will remain and need to be addressed in a thoughtful manner after this virus recedes. But in the shorter term, robots may help reduce transmission of a deadly virus and perhaps ease a little bit of anxiety around getting our food delivered.

Just in Time for Social Distancing, Rozum Cafe Launches its Robot Barista

There are two opposing forces during our sheltering in place and social distancing. We are actively avoiding other people, especially those we don’t know, and also actively working to maintain small comforts where they can be found — like in your morning cup of coffee.

While at-home packaged coffee sales have surged during our isolation, sales at Starbucks have dropped precipitously. A massive part of this drop, obviously is that Starbucks had to shut down its walk-in options last month. But once we emerge from quarantine, will those in need of a latté still stand in crowded stores with other people and trust the human hands crafting their drinks?

Perhaps the coronavirus could spur greater interest in robot-powered coffee kiosks. With their lack of humans, consistent product and ability to work around the clock, robo-ristas could become the next hot thing in coffee. Which means that the Rozum Cafe appears to have launched at the right time.

Developed by Belarus-based Rozum Robotics and announced this past weekend, the Rozum Cafe is an enclosed kiosk with an articulating arm that serves up a variety of coffee drinks. According to its FAQ, the Rozum Cafe can serve 300 drinks “per shift,” though they don’t say specifically how long a shift is. It can also be customized to expand drink menus and even serve up pastries.

There’s no official pricing for the Rozum Cafe, with the web site only saying that anyone buying one should actually get three of them for “optimal results” with the ROI. New owners will also have to pay for shipping, installing and setup of the machines.

The Rozum Cafe is certainly not alone in the robot coffee space. Cafe X, Briggo and MontyCafe have all already been on the market for more than a year.

However, the world has changed drastically in just the past few months and the opportunity for automated coffee could wind up being bigger than ever. In a post-pandemic world where we may no longer shake hands, grabbing a cup of coffee is something we’ll still want to do, just perhaps in a more humanless way.

Starship Robots Making Food Deliveries in Tempe, AZ

If a person dropping food off on your doorstep is still one human too many in these COVID-19 times, then maybe you should try moving to Tempe, AZ where Starship’s autonomous robots have started making restaurant deliveries.

Starship’s li’l rovers are squat, six-wheeled, cooler-sized robots that can scurry around town making deliveries. In a time when people are being asked to shelter in place, autonomous robots can help reduce human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus by, well, not being human.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Starship now has more than 30 autonomous, on-demand robots delivering daily between 10:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. Meals are available from three different Tempe restaurants: Fate Brewing Company, Tempe City Tacos and Venezia’s Pizza. For those in Tempe, the delivery area is bordered by S. Mill Ave. to the east, S. Rural Road to the west, Route 60 to the south and Southern Ave. to the north.

Starship had been focusing its go-to market in the US on colleges, where it has been steadily rolling out on different campuses over the past year. But with the global pandemic forcing schools to send students home and the rising need for contactless delivery, Starship’s shift towards deliveries for the general public makes sense.

Tempe is the third location in the US where Starship has been making non-college deliveries. The company has already begun delivering different restaurants in Washington DC and Irvine, CA. According to a Starship spokesperson, future delivery cities include the City of Fairfax in DC and Moutain View, CA (which will also be testing Nuro’s driverless delivery pods!).

In addition to requiring one less human putting themselves at risk to bring you a burrito, autonomous robots can also run continuously without needing a break, and can be easily cleaned in between trips.

Starship’s robots aren’t the only ones pitching in during these dire times. The Postmates Serve robot has been making deliveries in Los Angeles. On a much larger scale, the CEO of driverless van startup, Udelv, has publicly offered his company’s autonomous delivery services to help make deliveries in quarantined areas.

If you’re in the designated area in Tempe and use Starship’s robot delivery, take a picture and let us know how it went!

Nuro’s Driverless Delivery Vehicles Get Approval to Run on California Roads

Nuro announced today that it has been given permission to operate its driverless delivery vehicles on California’s public roads.

The Nuro R2 is a pod-like, low-speed autonomous vehicle about half the size of a normal car that only travels up to 25 mph. It features two cargo compartments and no area for a human driver or passenger.

Nuro has been on a bit of a regulatory roll this year. In February, the R2 got federal approval to operate on public roads.

But the world is a vastly different place today than it was back in February. With a global pandemic raging across the country and planet, the idea of a humanless means of delivering food seems pretty enticing right now. With trips to the grocery store now constituting a risk of contracting COVID-19, there has been a surge in grocery e-commerce. Instacart and other delivery service have instituted no-contact delivery and arm their workers with gloves and masks. Still, having a robot drive your groceries curbside removes another vector of human-to-human transmission.

It will be awhile before autonomous delivery vehicles like Nuro’s move into the mainstream, though. Previously, Nuro partnered with Walmart and Domino’s Pizza for autonomous delivery in Houston, TX. Given the shelter-in-place orders in California, there is no set timeline for Nuro’s R2 tests to begin other than “soon.” When it does, it will start in Mountain View, before rolling out to Santa Clara and San Mateo counties and eventually the whole state.

Even then, however, Nuro is going to have to work with local governments who are grappling with rapid technological change in real time, let alone a time of pandemic. Hopefully we won’t have to experience another global health crisis like this one in our lifetime. If we do, though, it would be nice to have more autonomous vehicles allowed to take over jobs that are vital, yet suddenly more dangerous, like food delivery.

Miso Robotics Officially Opens Equity Crowdfunding Campaign to Raise $30M

Miso Robotics, the company behind Flippy, the burger grilling, tater tot frying robot, announced today that it is kicking off its equity crowdfunding campaign to raise a $30 million Series C round.

Equity crowdfunding eschews traditional institutional funding such as venture capital and allows everyday people to invest directly in a company. In the case of Miso, a minimum investment of $1,493 per investor is required in order to participate. (And we should interject that any investment is a risk and this post is not an endorsement of Miso.)

Miso announced the equity crowdfunding campaign back in November, but it still required SEC approval before it could officially begin. According to the press announcement emailed to us, Miso says it has already secured $2.6 million in reservations with a pre-money valuation of $80 million.

Earlier this year, Miso introduced its newest generation of Flippy, the ROAR, which has the robot suspended on rails above a cooking space to make more room for any human co-workers.

This jump into equity crowdfunding comes at an interesting time, to say the least. The world is in the throes of a global pandemic that is costing millions of jobs, has sent the stock market reeling and is creating even new levels of uncertainty. How many everyday people impacted by COVID-19 are going to have the money to plunk down at minimum of $1,500 to own a small part of a robot company?

Not to mention the fact that a big driver of food automation in restaurants was a labor crunch. With an estimated 3 percent of US restaurants permanently closed, there will be a lot of human workers suddenly available once this pandemic passes.

On the other hand, the coronavirus outbreak and fear of human-to-human transmission of the virus is sparking all kinds of change throughout the food system. In a post-corona world, robots that prepare food could be seen as a way to make restaurants more hygienic. This, in turn, could spark a boom in food robotics.

Equity crowdfunding has become a bit of a trend in the food tech world. Other companies like Winc, Small Robot Company, GOffee and GoSun have all turned to the everyday investor for their latest rounds of funding. On one level, it provides them with the flexibility to grow as they like without added pressure from scale-seeking VCs, but it also denies companies the networks and knowledge VCs can provide.

Miso has made its choice, and now we’ll see if everyday investors flip for Flippy the robot.

Starship Robots Deliver Food Over Social Distances at Bowling Green

There is probably some grim metaphor in the fact that while people across the US shelter in place to avoid human contact, robots continue to roll out, making deliveries, unaware of the pandemic that surrounds them.

Ever since this outbreak started, we at The Spoon have wondered why autonomous delivery robots aren’t being used more often, especially in cities. As grocery and restaurant deliveries surge, robots could remove at least one human from the delivery equation (and they are a lot easier to scrub down after each use).

Turns out that Bowling Green State University is still using Starship robots for food delivery on campus, according to the Sentinel-Tribune. At least Jon Zachrich, Bowling Green State University Dining Director of Marketing and Communications, thinks that’s a good thing in these end times.

“I personally think it’s a good opportunity for social distancing, just because your only interaction is going to be with the actual robot, once it comes from our facility,” Zachrich told the Sentinel-Tribune.

He also spilled some factoids that I, as someone who follows the robot space, found interesting. The surface of the robot is non-porous, so it’s easy to clean. Zachrich also outlined some of the sanitizing protocols for the robot, saying that each robot is wiped down with disinfectant and anti-bacterial cleaners after each use.

On a more general interest note, Zachrich also gave us a glimpse as to how many orders the robots were running at Bowling Green before the pandemic. The robots debuted on campus on Feb. 20 and “Orders were quickly maxed out at over 750 per day,” the Sentinel-Tribune writes. Each of those came with $1.99 Starship delivery fee if you want to do the math on revenue generation.

That number has obviously dropped off as Bowling Green, like so many other colleges, has shifted to distance learning. Most restaurants on campus have closed, but the restaurants are still delivering to essential staff on campus and students who remained because they don’t have any other place to go.

This outbreak doesn’t seem to be subsiding anytime soon, especially in this country. With social distancing becoming the new norm, at least for the foreseeable future, perhaps more places will be like Bowling Green and get their own robots rolling across the social distance gap.

Amazon Selling its “Just Walk Out” Cashierless Tech to Other Retailers

Amazon is now selling the cashierless technology used in its Go stores to other retailers, Reuters reports. The business line is called “Just Walk Out,” and Amazon says it has already signed up several customers for the service.

The Just Walk Out technology is being used at a number of Amazon Go convenience stores across the country and the just-launched, larger Go Grocery store in Seattle. Using a combination of computer vision, shelf sensors and deep learning, Just Walk Out allows shoppers to do just that — grab an item and walk out, getting charged automatically upon exit.

There is one big difference in the way this technology is being offered to other retailers. Unlike Go stores, where you scan the Amazon Go app on your phone in order to enter a store, Just Walk Out for third party retailers will require shoppers to insert their credit card into a (Amazon branded) turnstile as they enter. The technology still monitors your shopping the same way, it would at an Amazon Go store, but if you need a receipt, there will be a kiosk for you to associate an email with that credit card.

As Reuters points out, this type of setup does bring up the question of who owns the customer data. If customers are handing over their email address, what type of relationship is it entering into with Amazon? Dilip Kumar, Amazon’s vice president of physical retail and technology told Reuters that Amazon saves the email and credit card information only for the purpose of charging the customer.

But that still leaves a ton of data around when customers shop, how often, what times, what they pick up in stores and what they put back, etc.. That’s a treasure trove of information that Amazon could use to feed its own algorithms and apply to its own real world retail game.

The actual news today isn’t actually that big of a surprise for industry watchers. CNBC reported last year that Amazon was looking to sell its cashierless tech to third parties to places like movie theaters.

But the big question is who will adopt this. It’s unlikely that grocery retailers like Albertsons or Kroger would be interested. They are already locked in a heated battle with Amazon as the e-commerce giant rolls out physical stores like the aforementioned Go Grocery, and its forthcoming chain of full-on supermarkets in Los Angeles. So there’s no real incentive to hand Amazon more money.

Plus, there are a lot of options for retailers looking to add cashierless checkout to their retail experiences. Trigo, Grabango, AiFi, Caper, and Zippin all offer cashierless solutions that either retrofit existing stores, or extend their brand with smaller, self-contained, standalone cashierless retail experiences.

Having said that, in many ways, Amazon could be for cashierless tech was IBM was for computing technology in the past. The saying used to go “no one gets fired for buying IBM,” and with Amazon’s size and track record, the Bezos behemoth could be the safe choice for smaller retailers to up their high-tech offerings.

Dexai Robotics Raises $5.5M for its Robot Sous Chef (That Can Scoop Ice Cream)

Dexai Robotics has raised a $5.5 million seed round for its robotic arm sous chef, the company announced yesterday. The round was led by Hyperplane Venture Capital with new investors Rho Capital, Harlem Capital, Contour Venture Partners, and NextView Ventures also participating.

Dubbed “Alfred,” Dexai’s robotic arm is meant to be a flexible food prep assistant that can work in various kitchen scenarios. The company says it can work with a restaurant’s existing set up, utensils and recipes to do things like assemble sandwiches, salads, and even scoop ice cream.

Alfred came about as a result of artificial intelligence for robotics research conducted in collaboration between MIT and Harvard. According to the press announcement, that research led to the software breakthrough that allowed Alfred to control “deformable materials” like ice cream, sushi-grade tuna, pico de gallo, etc.

Dexai was actually among the companies in our Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase, back in 2018. You can see the company’s brief pitch here.

SKS 2018 Startup Showcase: Dexai Robotics

With some QSRs reporting worker turnover rates as high as 150 percent, food robots and automation are one solution to the labor shortage restaurants are facing. Robots can work around the clock without a break and can take over repetitive, sometimes dangerous work in the kitchen, allowing humans to focus more on customer service.

Dexai is among a cohort of startups applying robotics to the kitchen. Miso Robotics‘ Flippy can grill burgers and fry foods, and Picnic’s modular robots can assemble 300 pizzas in an hour.

Dexai says that it will use this round of funding to expand its engineering, sales and product teams with the goal of serving new and different types of cuisines and scaling up.

Basil Street Raises $10 Million for its Pizza Vending Machines

Basil Street announced today that it has raised a $10 million round of funding that will help the company begin a multi-city pilot of its pizza vending machines starting this April.

Basil Street’s machines are roughly 20 square feet in size and hold up to 150 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. The machine serves cheese and pepperoni pies as well as a rotating “Pizza of the month,” each costing between $6.95 and $11.95. Pizzas are made fresh, flash frozen for storage in the machine, and reheated using a patent-pending, non-microwave speed oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

Like other vending machine companies, Basil Street is targeting high-volume, high-traffic areas such as airports, military bases, hospitals, college campuses or even inside existing locations like supermarkets.

And also like other vending machine companies, Basil Street is part of a wave of high-tech, haute cuisine automated food kiosks coming to market. Other players — Yo-Kai Express with its hot ramen, Chowbotics with its fresh salads, and Bake Xpress with its pastries (and pizza!) — are all vying to revolutionize what a vending machine is capable of.

But for Basil Street, selling pizza is just part of the equation and really just the start for the company. As we wrote last year, all the machines are IoT-enabled, so the company will have a ton of data to work with:

The company will know what people buy, when and where they buy it, and how often. Basil Street could use this data to target new cuisine offerings or new locations. The company started with pizza because it’s easier to ship and cook, but [Basil Street Cafe CEO, Deglin] Kenealy said the oven’s technology could be used to cook just about anything.

But first, Basil Street has to get its machines up and going, which it will do with this cash infusion (the company had previously raised $3.5 million in family and friends funding). Basil Street will be targeting Texas, Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina and Southern California for its first roll-outs.

Newsletter: So How the Heck Do We Deliver on The Promise of Food Personalization?

People have always wanted personalization in their products and services. That much was said multiple times last week at Customize, The Spoon’s daylong summit on food personalization. Event attendees and panelists alike also agreed that technology has increased our expectations around what personalization can even be when it comes to our food. Getting your name on a Coke bottle was once the extent of customized eats and drinks. Now we have software that analyzes our microbiome to tell us which foods are best for our unique bodies and restaurant systems that promise McDonald’s will never forget that I hate yellow mustard.

The promise of personalization was discussed in other areas of the food industry during the event, too. Companies like Kroger are using it to fill “food prescriptions” in the grocery store for diabetes patients. Digital kitchen platform Yummly wants to personalize your recipes, shopping lists, pantry, and, well, pretty much your entire kitchen and home cooking experience. 

The question is, How on earth are we supposed to deliver on all this promise? It’s one thing to talk onstage about the benefits of microbiome-based eating or reinventing the restaurant loyalty program. It’s quite another to convince the mainstream these operations actually do what they say, are based on sound science, and, most important, responsibly handle all that user data required to create truly personalized experiences. 

Are we there yet? No. The next steps for food personalization need to be around investing in the infrastructure to scale these technologies and, for investors, funding the kinds of companies that treat both users and their data with the utmost respect. These are the kinds of conversations we can expect to have more of as personalization evolves from buzzword to actual practice and we start to separate hype from reality.

The Latest Coronavirus Victim? Trade Shows

Had Customize been scheduled to take place this week rather than last, it’s quite possible the event wouldn’t have happened at all. Trade shows left and right are now getting canceled due to concerns over the widespread coronavirus outbreak. 

The Spoon’s publisher Mike Wolf has been keeping up with the closures. Yesterday, he reported that the Inspired Home Show had been canceled. “It’s an extraordinary move to cancel a trade show less than two weeks before it opens, but it’s an illustration of how fluid and fast-moving the situation is around the coronavirus,” he wrote.

Even more extraordinary? Postponing a show the day before it officially starts, which is what the Natural Products Expo West just had to do last night.

These are likely just the start of trade show cancellations and postponements. There are dozens of food industry events, both in the U.S. and overseas, slated for the next few months. As the number of coronavirus cases worldwide grows, and with it concerns from both conference-goers and organizers, more shows will likely be affected by the outbreak.

We’re in the Golden Age of Meat Vending Machines

Let’s end this thing on a brighter note.

My colleague Chris Albrecht got a tip this week about an automated vending machine in South Korea called Meatbox 365. Users can choose from a range of meats in a variety of cuts, using a touchscreen to select their choices. As Chris wrote, “Meatbox 365 is basically a 24-hour butcher shrunk down into a very small physical footprint.” 

The machine is currently getting a lot of press because it’s the kind of automated, unmanned machine cities and countries greatly affected by coronavirus need in order to keep crowds out of places like supermarkets. It’s also the kind of high-tech vending machine that could be the perfect testing ground for personalization. Someday, the Meatbox 365 or a similar machine will automatically know which cut of beef I like, and what kind of meat I should be eating in the first place (if plant-based beef hasn’t taken over by then).

Just hold the yellow mustard, please.

Stay sane,

Jenn

West Hollywood Approves Delivery ‘Bots, Missouri Mulls its Own Robot Regs

In addition to random celebrity sightings, residents of West Hollywood, CA will soon be spotting autonomous delivery robots in their neighborhood. Last night the West Hollywood city council approved the use of delivery robots on its city streets (hat tip to WeHoVille).

A trial of the program will start next month with Postmates’ Serve robot and run for 90 days. Serve is a cooler-sized robot that scurries around on four wheels, and while it can run autonomously using sensors and cameras to avoid people and obstacles, the city council is requiring a human chaperone during the trial. Additionally, only three robots can be in operation at once, they can only run during the day, and they aren’t allowed on sidewalks deemed substandard.

Serve has already been making deliveries in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles since the tail end of last year, and the West Hollywood expansion illustrates how cautious local regulators are being when it comes to robots.

Across the country from West Hollywood, state lawmakers in Missouri introduced their own bill to regulate sidewalk delivery robots. The proposed legislation would limit a robot’s weight to 200 lbs, have autonomous driving capabilities, and require an insurance policy of $100,000 to cover any damages.

State and local governments across the country are grappling with rapid innovation like sidewalk robots essentially in real time. Lawmakers have to weigh the convenience of something like an autonomous sidewalk robot with the costs. Sidewalk robots could help reduce traffic congestion by getting delivery cars off the road, but then you have fleets of ‘bots crowding sidewalks. Robots could make meal delivery more affordable, but you have to make sure they are distributed in an equitable fashion. Then there are questions around liability and privacy when running robots on public streets, and more fundamental questions like where robots can recharge.

The point is, autonomous robot delivery technology is available and ready, now we just to wait and see how it will be integrated into our everyday lives.

Udelv Offers its Driverless Delivery Vans to Assist with Coronavirus Efforts

If there is anything “lucky” about the deadly coronavirus outbreak marching its way across the world, it could be the timing. At at time when human-to-human interactions, especially in quarantined areas, need to be limited, we actually live in a world where driverless delivery vehicles and robots aren’t science fiction, but could actually be a viable means to supply delivery.

In Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus which is currently on lockdown, online grocery shopping has been a lifeline for those forced to stay home. Even here in the U.S. where no large-scale quarantines are in place, the New York-based online grocer FreshDirect has attributed a spike in sales to media coverage around COVID-19.

But in both of those scenarios, you still have human drivers bringing food to human customers. In China, they’ve implemented a contactless method for delivery wherein the delivery person and the consumer remain ten feet apart from each other, but there is still a human putting themselves at risk to feed another human.

Given that there are a host of startups working on self-driving delivery technology, we at The Spoon were wondering if and when any of them would raise their hand to help out in the efforts to combat the effects of the coronavirus.

Today, Udelv, which makes self-driving and tele-operated delivery vans, made such a move, and on Twitter announced that it was ready to pitch in.

At first, this may seem like some mercenary Silicon Valley grab for press attention amidst a humanitarian crisis. But two things can be true at the same time.

To find out more about Udelv’s intentions, I spoke with its CEO, Daniel Laury, by phone today. He explained that his company’s delivery trucks could be useful in quarantine situations such as the one in Wuhan because they can be tele-operated. There is still someone driving the delivery van, they are just housed in a remote location. Vans could be sent in to deliver food, medicine or other supplies without putting a human driver at risk.

Additionally, Udelv trucks are built with customizable individual cargo compartments. Each order has its own delivery cubby that is unlocked with user’s phone when it arrives. So a grocery route could have multiple stops with people only able to access their own orders.

Asked if he would charge for the use of Udelv’s services, Laury told me “This is done with the best intention. I’m not charging. I’m not going to make money on this.”

In talking with him, it seemed like Laury saw what was going on and saw that his company might be able to help. He hasn’t worked through all of the details yet; for example, rules around autonomous vehicles on public roads have only recently been enacted here in the US, though I imagine there could exceptions made for extreme quarantine situations. And Laury doesn’t have a particular sanitization workflow in mind. It’s one thing to not have a human driver, but if you have an infected person touching or coughing at the inside of a cargo hold, that cargo hold will need some kind of scrub down.

“We’re expert in autonomous trucking, not viruses,” Laury told me. He considers Udelv’s truck just another tool that could be used to help fight the outbreak. Udelv would provide vans to a government agency like the CDC, and they would institute proper sterilization procedures. His company would just make sure supplies gets from point A to B.

So far Udelv has not been contacted by any government agencies either at home or abroad. Udelv doesn’t even operate in China, but Laury said he’s happy to put some vans on a boat if they want. “I don’t know anyone at the CDC or the administration that I can contact directly,” Laury said. “It’s one of the reasons I put out this tweet. Maybe it’s picked up by someone who is in charge.”

If someone in charge is reading, perhaps you can take look at how autonomous vehicles might be able to help.